Foundational Research

Where and When: Phoenix, Arizona and New York City, 2014Result: Actionable suggestions for opportunities across products and platforms

As the Learnvest team prepared to begin a complete reimagining of our premium client experience (and a ground-up build that would invariably take at least four months to get to an MVP,) I advocated for a concentrated two-week research push to ensure we got as much "right" as possible out of the gate. Involving dedicated research resources as well as the designers and developers who would ultimately be working on the project, we brought together ethnographic research (20+ in-target existing and potential clients in Phoenix and New York) with facilitated discussion sessions and observation of our financial planners and sales associates to better understand how people think and feel about their finances.

I spearheaded the overall effort, created many of our research protocols, facilitated working sessions, and lead the team through exercises to find and distill patterns from the raw outputs. While the new product was ultimately delayed, our findings have heavily influenced teams across the organization and set the direction for our future vision.